Cameron's EU 'propaganda' ignores election law, MPs claim

David Cameron has been accused of trying to ignore the law designed to ensure the EU referendum is a fair contest.

The Prime Minister has refused to remove pro EU “propaganda” from government websites, including dire warnings that Brexit would cost Britain 500,000 jobs and cause recession.

By law, government resources must not be used in campaigning during the four-week “purdah” period before polling day to ensure a fair contest between the competing sides and to keep the Civil Service impartial.

In a concessions to the Eurosceptics, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, announced that the government would be “effectively freezing” its EU Referendum website, which contains the official warnings about the impact of Brexit.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet SecretaryCredit:
Steve Back/Rex Features

Sir Jeremy also announced that the government would be “removing links to the web site” from all other government websites “so that people will actively have to search out information previously published”.

Bernard Jenkin, chair of the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee, said the move represented “quite a climb down” for Number 10. “It should not be necessary to badger ministers and officials into doing the right thing," he said.

Downing Street was “hoping to get away with ignoring the law” on purdah, he claimed.

Watch | Cameron's pro-EU leaflet: what it says and is it fact or fiction?

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But Mr Jenkin said he was not satisfied that these steps would go far enough to ensure that the final phase of the referendum campaign was fair. He has written back to Sir Jeremy to demand that the government changes the web addresses for the reports and campaign material so that they do not show up on Google searches until after the vote.

“They are still over the line,” Mr Jenkin told The Telegraph. “It should not be possible to turn up this government propaganda by just Googling a few words, like ‘Treasury’ and ‘recession’. And what about Civil Service impartiality? This has also been outrageously compromised.

“The government machinery could never be used to actively campaign in this way in the run-up to a general election. The same should apply in referendums, or the result of the referendum will lack all authority and credibility.”